Black leopard photos are awesome but not first in 100 years

By Reis Thebault and Alex Horton

February 14, 2019 — 4.27pm

After days of painstaking photography in a Kenyan wildlife reserve, Will Burrard-Lucas checked his camera and found his dream shot - a stunning shimmer from the eyes of a black leopard, or panther, an extremely rare find in that part of the world.

Thrilled, the British wildlife photographer posted the pictures to his blog, his Twitter and his Instagram accounts, blasting the news out to a combined 190,000 followers. These initial posts set off a chain reaction of sensational headlines.

"Ultra-rare black leopard is photographed for the first time in 100 YEARS in Africa," the Daily Mail trumpeted.

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"African black leopard photographed for the first time in over 100 years, scientist says," CNN said.

There was only one problem: they weren't true.

Burrard-Lucas, in an interview with The Washington Post, stressed that his photos - along with footage in the same area captured by San Diego Zoo researchers - did announce a breathtaking moment - just not quite the one that was rocketing around social media, fuelled by exaggerated media reports.

The images - taken at the Laikipia Wilderness Camp - were actually the first in nearly a century to document the rosette patterned-speckled coat of an African leopard, confirming the existence on the continent of the genetic mutation that makes black leopards, well, black.

Those headlines turned a significant, yet carefully parsed, achievement into a social media moment of mass confusion, helping, Burrard-Lucas said, to spread the false notion that black leopards haven't been seen or photographed in Africa in a century.

That's not true. Phoebe Okall, a photographer with the Daily Nation, photographed such an animal at the nearby Ol Jogi Conservancy in 2013, the paper reported.

And, after the Laikipia images were released, the Ol Ari Nyiro Conservancy produced a high-quality image of a black leopard taken in 2007, National Geographic reported.

The difference, Burrard-Lucas noted, was the evidence needed to make a scientific judgment call. Researchers need to see the melanism, the genetic mutation, but the coats appear black to the naked eye (and the camera lens) during the day.

"But infrared imagery reveals the leopard's iconic rosette patterns at night," the San Diego Zoo said in a news release.

"Everyone had a story," said Nicholas Pilfold, a scientist who was part of the San Diego Zoo team. "It really became this myth that built up over time. It's been something rare and elusive and very hard to get."

Other people had clearly seen black leopards in the area. Sightings and rumours of the big cats at the Laikipia Wilderness Camp brought Burrard-Lucas to the park in the first place, he wrote.

After contacting the landowners, he set out his motion-sensitive cameras near the nocturnal animal's tracks.

"It's very dusty, so you can pick up tracks especially early in the morning after the night," he told Reuters. "You can see everything that's passed.

"I'm able to set up a kind of studio-like lighting and just leave my cameras set up for weeks or months."

Now that the scientists have the images, they can begin studying why exactly this genetic mutation occurs in the savanna, as most black leopards are found in tropical south-east Asia, where their dark coats help them sneakily hunt prey.

Capturing those pictures was quite a feat, Burrard-Lucas said, and he was frustrated that many outlets missed the point and distorted the story.

"All they're seeing is a headline and a tweet," he said. "They have a valid point, but my blog post is clear. People who now understand how it got used are understanding."

To underscore his point, Burrard-Lucas added an addendum to the blog post that started it all: "For clarification, I am not claiming that these are the first photos of a black leopard taken in Africa. I do however believe that they are the first high-quality camera trap photographs."

At least one of the offending news outlets made a change, too, softening the iffy historical claims: "Rare black leopard captured in new images from Kenya," CNN revised.

Twitter users were quick to poke fun at the provocative and inaccurate headlines, some posting “ultra-rare” photos of their own.

Yet other observers, such as the carnivore ecologist Mordecai Ogada, argued this was another example of "conservation apartheid", writing that, seemingly, "nothing exists in Africa until a white person observes it".

Ogada, who has done conservation work in Kenya for more than a decade, added that he and a team of scientists trapped a black leopard during their research in 2001.